It’s my privilege to be here with you at Church and State Perth 2025 where we’re looking at protecting the innocence of children. My name is John Steenhoff. I am a lawyer and yes I know that even Jesus didn’t have good things to say about lawyers but I’m a lawyer at the Human Rights Law Alliance.

We are a Christian not-for-profit law firm that helps Christians who face hostility for their faith. Today I’m going to be talking with you about protecting the innocence of children. I want to give you some context, particularly in the context of compulsory sex education and also some wisdom on how to deal with this issue drawn from many, many years of dealing with Christians who are facing hostility for their faith. HRLA is an organisation that exists to defend religious freedom through strategic litigation, that is running court cases that are going to produce wins and that are going to change law and culture.

It’s relevant that we have key focus areas. We have six that we have identified 

1. Religious Freedom is Safeguarded
2. All Can Speak Freely
3. Parental Rights are Guaranteed
4. Religious Organisations Thrive
5. Marriage and Family are Protected
6. Conscience is Accommodated

The one that we’re talking about today is in fact number three. We want to ensure that parental rights are guaranteed.

A key part of our mission is to protect the rights of parents for that is the primary way that religious belief is preserved and shared and given through the generations. Today we’re looking at the question of compulsory sex education. How do we protect the innocence of our children? How do we stop the indoctrination of children into a worldview that is contrary to what the Bible says, contrary to what the church has taught for millennia and contrary to what society has upheld as being in the common good at least until the last 60 years.

Not only that and most importantly what’s being taught in the schools is contrary to the fundamental beliefs of parents. Well it’s important to look at the background and the background of our understanding of the state of parents, of schools, of children is in western culture and western culture owes a great debt to Greek classical philosophy as one of the key sources of today’s modern culture. But that philosophy is remarkably deficient when it comes to parental rights.

Plato, one of the foremost Greek philosophers, wrote in his Republic that children ought to be held in common under the state’s supervision and care such that neither will a parent know his own offspring nor a child his parent. This is in stark contrast to what the Bible teaches. Indeed when we look at the Bible it has no sense that the state has responsibility for the raising and formation of children.

All throughout the Bible there is very clear teaching that it is a parent’s responsibility. Think of the fifth commandment in Exodus 20:12 where God commands; 

Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

Indeed Deuteronomy 6:6-9 sets out clearly what parents must do.

6 And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. 8 You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

The book of Proverbs includes large sections of a father instructing his son, parents instructing children.

Proverbs 1:8-9 

8 Hear, my son, your father’s instruction and forsake not your mother’s teaching,

9 for they are a graceful garland for your head and pendants for your neck.

The Bible’s teaching is very clear. Parents must raise their children, must teach them sound morality and ethics, must teach them to fear God and love their neighbour and do this within a Christian community.

It’s parents who must shape and mould their children’s beliefs. Now, you don’t have to be a Christian to recognise that parents clearly have the first and primary responsibility for raising children. Indeed Professor Robbie George from Princeton University, a law professor and fine Catholic thinker, has talked about this in a recent article where he looked at who’s responsible for shaping the beliefs and values of children.

Is it the government or is it parents? And he draws on natural law theory to say that it is definitely parents who have the responsibility and therefore have the authority to direct their children’s education. This is not a matter of just cultural convention but an objective and deep moral truth. Children are not born in the state.

Children are born to parents, a mother and a father and are therefore theirs. They belong to them. Not in a sense that would reduce children to the status of property but in the sense that parents have the right to direct the upbringing of their children.

Now where does the government fit in? Well on this account the government has no freestanding right with respect to children. Children don’t belong to the state in the same way they belong to parents but in extreme circumstances government may intervene to protect children from parental abuse or neglect. But those interventions are only legitimate when parents actually abuse or neglect their children and forfeit their rights by defaulting on their responsibilities.

In fact it’s really important to know that parental rights and responsibilities are pre-political. That is they exist before any sense of the political. And think about that, it makes sense doesn’t it? What came first, families or governments? Parental guidance or state laws? It’s very clear that long before there was any form of communal government, however simple that might have been, there were parents, there were children.

Long before there was a king making laws or a chief setting down his statutes, there were families, there were parents who were raising and instructing their children and those children were theirs. Many philosophers have recognized this, indeed John Locke who was a key thinker in setting out what a good and biblical responsible government should look like said that parental child rearing is independent of political authority. It precedes and it is over government authority.

Sir William Blackstone who was one of the foremost commentators on the common law wrote that the rights of parents are embedded in the common law. The right and duty of parents to provide maintenance, protection and education for their children. But increasingly modern thinkers have put forward models that look more like what Plato described, where the state is responsible and parents are relegated to the sideline.

Dr Amy Goodman is a clear example of that. She was president of the University of Pennsylvania and she has made many writings about the state which she says has the right and duty to shape the moral character and fundamental beliefs of children regardless of parental wishes. She says it’s the state’s job to form adult citizens committed to secular standards of modern liberal democracies and who are left free to choose their own version of the good life.

She says that public schools and other governmental institutions cannot escape looking after children’s souls in many significant and subtle ways. The year 2025 in fact marks the 100th anniversary of a key United States Supreme Court decision that looked at this very issue, whether the state could dictate education or whether it was the parents right. In the case of Pierce and the Society of Sisters in 1925, the United States court made this great statement, the child is not the mere creature of the state.

Again, the child is not the mere creature of the state. The fundamental liberty on which all governments repose prevents the government from attempting to take away from parents the right to educate their children and to insist that they be instructed by public education only. Parental rights include the right to choose private education.

This is a case that fundamentally shaped the intersection of education, parental rights and religious freedom in America. It’s a case that sets out the basic principles that apply through all common law jurisdictions, including in Australia. So what is the law in Australia and how do we understand the legal context around education? What are the rights of parents? What are the rights of schools? What are the rights of the state? And what are the rights of students? Well, we’ve talked about the common law underpinning that recognizes parents as having primary authority over the moral upbringing of their children and their education.

There are a few key common law principles that are relevant to this discussion. The first is the idea of in loco parentis. This is a Latin term which at its simplest means delegating to someone else to stand in the place of parents, in loco parentis.

This is how it was traditionally understood schools worked, that schools stood in the place of the parent, having delegated authority from the parent to educate the child for the good of the community. That meant that schools are to act in cooperation with parents and never in opposition and in contrast to a parent’s wishes. Alongside that was another doctrine of parents patriae, another Latin term which recognized the jurisdiction of the king of the state, now government courts, to oversee issues of guardianship for those who are vulnerable or where parents have not properly executed their obligations in relation to children.

Even in common law we see this tension between parents and state but undisputably the rights of parents are paramount. The other place where we find an exposition of what parental rights are is in our international human rights documents. The key documents that Australia is a signatory to are the ICCPR, the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

If we look at the ICCPR we see parental rights in Article 18, the mighty clause that recognizes the freedom of religion, freedom of thought, speech and expression. And if you look on your screen you can see that Article 18.4 recognizes that states must grant and respect to parents their freedom to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in accordance with their own convictions. And this is repeated in the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Now in the Steenhoff family my six children know they have very few rights. They have the right to do the dishes, they have the right to clean their room, they have the right to go to bed when they’re told and they have the right to obey every command from their parents. The Convention on the Rights of the Child gives them far greater rights which I never tell them about but even they recognize the primacy of parents.

Article 5. Governments should respect that families are responsible to guide their children. Article 14. Children are free to have their own thoughts, opinions and religion under the guidance of their parents.

These covenants, while not formally introduced into Australian law, are undertakings by Australia that they will reflect these in their local laws. And so when we look at education law in Australia we can see again the struggle between these principles. Who’s responsible? State, parents, schools and every state has its own education laws.

Probably the best example of where this tension is reflected is in the New South Wales Education Act and when it talks about the principles of the Act it says both that education of a child is primarily the responsibility of a child’s parents but also it is the duty of the state to ensure that every child receives an education of the highest quality. There is this understanding that the state has a large obligation to educate all children in Australia and this is part of the zeitgeist of Australian education from the beginning. The earliest origins of schooling in Australia saw Governor Macquarie conceive that the purpose of state education was to improve the morals of the lower orders and develop religious principles in the young.

That is a noble sentiment indeed. The problem is that while that religious sentiment of the state in early days was Christian, today it is something far more hostile and foreign. And along with a change in the fundamental principles and ideologies that we’re finding in our education we’re also seeing an increased role of the state in education.

You see the traditional arrangement between stakeholders of education where parents were primarily responsible is giving way to a model of state supremacy. I’ve got a pictorial representation of that here with what I’m sharing on screen and you can see the stakeholders and their arranged relationships, a mix of statute, common law and it has parents clearly as the centre of gravity there instructing schools on how to educate students with parents and schools operating cooperatively to raise students. What we’ve seen in the last 50 years is that while the stakeholders have not changed the relationship has.

We’re seeing that the state is increasingly taking more and more of an intrusive role in all aspects of education and that it has taken to itself primary responsibility for administering what schools teach, how students are to learn and what parents are responsible for when it comes to the education of their children. Complicating this is the fact that curriculum is established at a national level by the Commonwealth Government and the Commonwealth body ACARA, the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, whereas all of the requirements that relate to attending school and the facilitating of that curriculum is administered at a state level. So when it comes to attendance and participation in classes at public schools and how parents can deal with content that they find objectionable, such as compulsory sex education, this is different from state to state and different states have different exemptions.

If we look on the screen you can see the varying jurisdictions and their varying exemptions. Now for the purpose of WA, there are provisions in the Education Act allowing parents to remove children from classes. In other states there are none, including in Queensland, South Australia and the ACT.

In Western Australia, where all of you are currently residing, it has the most sensible regime which allows parents of students enrolled in government schools to make a written request to the school principal that their child be exempt from certain classes if they have a conscientious objection and then the principal can determine whether to grant an exemption or whether a condition should be imposed. But it’s important to understand the broader legal context that parental rights don’t just exist in statute and just because no exemption exists in certain jurisdictions doesn’t mean that parents are completely powerless because parental rights are pre-political and the courts have recognised that they exist strongly in common law that parents are primarily responsible for the education of their children. Now this is an issue that has not seen much in the way of litigation in the courts.

We don’t have cases that have been decided at any level which really thrash out how far parents can go in directing how their children are to learn and indeed if that litigation was taken it would be long, it would be expensive. But it’s important to understand that parents have rights and to be convinced of those rights to be able to stand on them and parents who are engaging with public schools about content that they find objectionable should really be confident. They should know the school policies and use them to their advantage.

If there is a policy that allows them to exempt a child, try to operate under it, try to take the pathway of least resistance, try to ensure that the option that you’re giving to the school is the easiest pathway forward for the school. You’ve got to be able to insist that the school cannot dictate the moral and ethical training that’s given to a child, that it is your responsibility as a parent and you have to try to come to pragmatic arrangements. That is the best way forward.

While you have legal rights no one wants to have to enforce those rights in a court. The only people who win from litigation are lawyers like me. The other thing to remember is that there are laws that protect religious people including discrimination laws.

It is quite possible for a parent who’s been refused any exemption or any take out of their children from class to take a discrimination claim against someone or against a school who refuses to uphold their religious freedom and their freedom to educate their children in the way that they believe and are convicted about including removing them from sexuality education. There’s not a lot of legal advice that can be given in these circumstances because there are not a lot of legal cases that consider this but there’s plenty of practical advice that I can give and I want to spend the last few minutes of this presentation looking at that. So here quickly is the practical advice that I would give to you.

The first is as with everything make sure you have witnesses to all interactions and have everything in writing. When you are given instructions from the school or directions or decisions make sure that you get them in writing and that there is a clear record of everything that’s been said and established by the school when you’re dealing with conscientious objection to sexuality education. Know that you can of course choose your school.

Private schools often offer greater flexibility and Christian schools often have curriculum that is unobjectionable and of course the most flexibility you’ll have is if you home school but that is not the calling for many many people but it may be for you. The other thing is to get involved in your school and talk to your children about what they are learning and know what is coming up in the curriculum. Ask for resources, there’s nothing wrong with you asking the school to provide you with the resources that they use for their health and health policies and their required sexuality education.

You can also make a stipulation that you need to give informed consent particularly to third party providers and try to keep things local. Deal with the teacher, the executive, the principal. Don’t deal with the department of education.

Try to come to local arrangements with the school because ultimately schooling is a cooperative exercise between parents and teachers. There’s also benefit and collective action. Make sure that you have other parents on board.

It’s going to be much more convincing when six or seven parents come to the school to ask for an exemption rather than one and lastly of all make sure that you know what it is that you believe, that you understand why a Christian cannot have their child learning compulsory sex education and that you can articulate your conscientious objections and if you face any trouble make sure that you call the Human Rights Law Alliance. We’ve provided assistance to Christians who are facing hostility, discipline, censure and potential trouble in all sorts of legal frameworks including education. Thank you for listening to my talk and may God bless you as you raise your children, as you protect their innocence and as you raise them to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.